“... away, Yeltsin simply stepped onto the top of the pyramid. The chronicle of his first year in office is not bad, though it has darkened since the brilliant flash that marked the failure of the Coup. The ending of Communist rule was more unequivocally a good thing than the ending of the Soviet Union, though the two could not in practice be separated: the ...”

“... dominance: as Browning was to put it, ‘the man Clive – he fought Plassey, spoiled the clever/foreign game,/Conquered and annexed and Englished!’ This image of ‘the game’, which seems so quintessentially Kiplingesque, was already well established in proto-imperial relations, and was to appear during Burke’s management of the attempted impeachment ...”

“... after independence, its absorption of princely states a ‘stupendous achievement’, its foreign policy ‘a staggering performance’. Nehru himself, ‘in the hearts and minds of his countrymen’, is ‘George Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt and Eisenhower rolled into one’.All countries have fond images of themselves, and big ...”

“... Game” ’. All these years later, Steele has still failed to winkle any more details out of the Foreign Office – but then again, those other celebrity spies, Malcolm Muggeridge and Graham Greene, were equally close-lipped about what they actually did in the war. Shipton’s job, whatever it was, ended in October 1942. He walked out again, and in ...”

“... European question until relatively recently. In Powell’s heyday, the movement of people was a Commonwealth concern; Europe was about the movement of goods. Powell could pose as a popular tribune on matters of race; his views about national sovereignty were neither here nor there, as evidenced by the fact that they did little to sway the outcome of the ...”

“... countryside, seaside holidays and an unparalleled tradition of Parliamentary government. To entice foreign visitors, four London buses made a promotional tour of the Continent. The lead bus, which sported a giant Union Jack, broadcast a continuous recording of ‘God Save the King’ and other patriotic anthems. ‘Not surprisingly’, Richard Weight remarks ...”

“... neo-Soviet populists who propagate the false notion of the USSR as a paradisiac Russian-speaking commonwealth, benignly ruled from Moscow, a natural continuum of the tsarist empire, disturbed only by Nazi invaders to whom ‘the west’ are heirs and the only obstacle to its re-creation. If you were born after 1985 you have no remembered reality to measure ...”

“... EU’s share of British trade has recently been shrinking, in 2015, the latest year for which the Office for National Statistics has published figures, 44 per cent of UK exports went to EU countries. So why, in Hannan’s mind, would the cost of meeting EU standards be a better reason to leave the single market than the single market’s commitment to free ...”

“... had been ‘highly committed adult participants in the epic, glorious rebirth of the Jewish commonwealth’. It was Simha Flapan, Morris wrote, who began to see the central fallacies of the old history: first, that the Jewish settler community in Palestine, the Yishuv, joyously embraced partition and the truncated Jewish state prescribed by the UN ...”

“... more intention than Lawson or Howe of hewing to her vision of Europe. With scarcely over a year in office behind him, Major signed the Treaty of Maastricht, after negotiating an opt-out from the single currency. On his return to London, the government press release crowed that the upshot of the conference in the Netherlands was ‘game, set and match’ to ...”

“... Light Company; in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool, Iberdrola; in Manchester, a consortium of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and a J.P. Morgan investment fund. More than anyone, you’d think, it would matter to the people who made these arrangements possible in the first place. What has happened is not what they promised or intended when they put ...”

“... or an insurrectionary group, or a religious movement, to be seen presenting themselves at a foreign embassy day after day in the hope of obtaining a visa. Even if the embassy is not under surveillance, there are likely to be local staff who will report the application. Safer, for those who can afford airline tickets, to think of a destination that does ...”

“... British Constitution in the Streets of the World’s Metropolis, London, Londres, London?’ The foreign gentleman begged to be pardoned, but did not altogether understand . . . ‘It merely referred,’ Mr Podsnap explained, with a sense of meritorious proprietorship, ‘to Our Constitution, Sir. We Englishmen are Very Proud of our Constitution, Sir. It ...”

“... family tree concocted for Philip’s father, they acquired substance only as members of the new office-holding and courtly nobility that grew up under Henry VIII and Edward VI. The standard of living to which they then grew accustomed became a heavy burden under Elizabeth, whose favours to the family were intermittent and grudging. From the late 16th ...”

“... and secret documents. He pioneered a system of spy networks which long outlasted the English Commonwealth. The documents and reports brought back by couriers from the Continent (still available in the British Library) were analysed in detail by a group that included John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Among other things, they helped support the operations of ...”